Johannesburg, 22 Apr 2010
Consumers are increasingly more demanding of the businesses they buy from, particularly when it comes to the customer service experience. In line with this, contact centres are evolving.
In the past, the main purpose of the contact centre was to make or receive calls; today, however, consumers are better connected than ever before, making cross-channel communication one trend that is taking off.
“Customer communication is changing,” says Francis Bakos, business solutions executive at Intelleca, a division of Bytes Technology Group, “and they're using an ever expanding range of channels such as phone, e-mail, Web, chat, SMS, fax, and video call to communicate with a company. Organisations need to adapt to this in order to meet customer expectations, provide a unified level of service and reduce their costs, especially as the new millennial generation starts to enter the consumer market. The big question is how to manage all these interactions.”
The answer, Bakos says, is the multi-channel contact centre, which is capable of cross-channel conversations. It enables customers to communicate through the medium of their choice in the way that's most convenient for them at any given time - they can choose to call the contact centre one day, follow up their query with an e-mail on the following day, and perhaps an SMS a week later, without having to restart the whole conversation every time.
The technology is so advanced that it's possible to see if a customer is browsing your Web site and calling you while they are in the Web session. It then allows you to co-browse with the caller to help them resolve their query.
Another major development, Bakos adds, is the integration of interaction management functions into the back office, ensuring even greater continuity of communication.
“From the customer's point of view, they will experience unified, continuous and personalised service across all channels,” says Bakos. “At the same time, the organisation becomes more efficient as contextual information helps to reduce talk time while decreasing repeat calls. Data and analytics become more powerful as the business has the ability to analyse across all channels of communication. The power of being able to view and analyse all your customers, and all their interactions, across all channels at any given moment in time, brings about more insight than most customers realise. This means productivity goes up along with efficiency, resulting in a marked increase in customer satisfaction.”
The first step to achieving cross-channel communication is to implement a universal queuing system, a technology that integrates all contact channels, back office and media into the same queue to standardise processing and handling.
Bakos says Intelleca is the leading company in South Africa to offer this functionality to its customers. “Our solution captures, routes, manages, integrates and reports on all inbound and outbound customer interactions irrespective of media type, guaranteeing the proper treatment of each interaction. The solution centralises the creation, administration, and management of the customer interaction process, and integrates with existing contact centre infrastructure.
“No one knew it was even possible to unify all communication channels when we first started talking to customers about it,” he adds. “There is a lot of excitement about the technology, and for those whose budgets are currently restricted, there's even a compelling return on investment - ranging from efficiency gains to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
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